Our third workshop focuses on Critical Whiteness Studies in the USA and its German equivalent, Kritische Weißseinsforschung and their histories as academically established fields of research. Two key questions are: What are the historiographical frameworks to which these two fields respectively refer? And how do they position themselves in relation to the historical period of slavery and colonialism which has been so fundamental to processes of racialization? For Critical Whiteness Studies and Kritische Weißseinsforschung, it has always been essential to engage with the Black knowledge archive. Black diasporic knowledge production (with increasing intensity since the 1990s) developed the epistemological framework for accessing sources of knowledge and dimensions of lived experience that had previously not been represented in conventional archives and spaces of memory, but which are indispensable for problematizing white positionings within white supremacist discourse. Transatlantic dialogues have been crucial to these intellectual and cultural engagements. The concept of the Black Atlantic, with its implications of multidimensionality and transculturality, makes it possible to explore a wide range of historical and cultural connections between the Americas, Africa and Europe. It also facilitates reflections about diasporic positionings, as well as a fundamental critique of specific mechanisms of white hegemony. In this context, it is highly important to trace historical trajectories. The workshop will thus begin with an inquiry into the formation of racist knowledge in connection with the biologistic underpinning of the idea of ‘race’ in the late eighteenth century. Subsequently, we will investigate the constitutive conditions of whiteness during German colonialism. Finally, we will examine the specific situation in Germany after 1945, as both, a post-colonial and post-Nazi society. To what extent can postcolonial criticism be applied to Germany? Which historical and mediatized interferences and shifts does this entail? We will also discuss strategies of marking People of Color as ‘Other’, as well as strategies that have been used to increase the visibility (and audibility) of Black perspectives and experiences in historiography, discourses of memory, and social debates. These discussions will be framed by a transatlantic perspective, paying particular attention to the Afro-German and African-American contexts.

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